Thomas Hart Benton

Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Updated: Dec. 11, 2012

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was a quintessential painter of the American experience. By the early 1930s, Benton was the leader of the Regionalist movement, which trumpeted the virtues of rural America. In the era before Abstract Expressionism, few American artists had a larger public presence than Benton.

He was the first artist to make it on the cover of Time magazine (1934), which praised him as one of a stellar trio of regional painters — including Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry — in touch with the true spirit of America.

Background

Benton was born in Neosho, Mo., into a family of lawyer-politicians, big-deal types who, in Benton’s words, “drank heavily, ate heartily and talked long over fat cigars.” His great-uncle had been a United States senator; his father, Maecenas Benton, known as the Colonel, was a congressman. As a boy, Benton accompanied his father on rural campaigns. He made note, and later made use, of the Colonel’s pronouncement-prone stump style. And he never forgot the experience of hearing everyday people talking about what mattered in their lives.

But professional politics was not for him. He wanted to be an artist. His father, who considered art an unmanly trade, was furious; the two were never close again. But with the support of his mother, Lizzie, a strong-minded woman with social ambitions, Benton embarked on what would be a long, awkward and episodic cultural ­education.

Still in his teens, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on illustration and newspaper cartooning. But he soon became interested in painting and decided to head to Paris, where he landed with little money, no French and only a vague idea of how to wield a brush. He stayed for three years, splitting his time between copying old masters in the Louvre and immersing himself in a modern art scene that was, in the years before World War I, on the boil.

In Paris, he played the roustabout bohemian to the hilt, wearing artsy clothes, acquiring a mistress, reading Ruskin and Hippo­lyte Taine, drinking all night, getting into fights. But his painting was shaky, as he tried out a range of styles — Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, abstraction, one after the other, often in combination — with dispiriting results. Whenever he felt he was on to something, he slapped himself down, in a self-destructive pattern that would take other forms later on.

The experimentation went on for years after he returned to the United States, to New York City. Yet once back on native turf, he gradually became a different, definite kind of artist, mostly through a process of rejection. Out went the Left Bank wardrobe, the mistresses, Ruskin and Taine, and interest in any European painters apart from old masters. He decided that he despised most modern art, and the artists who made it. Emboldened by newfound confidence, he insisted on sharing his views, as well as an enemies-list-in-formation — Alfred Stieglitz and the young Stuart Davis topped it — with whoever would listen.

By the early 1920s, he had worked out a distinctive brand of stylized realism inspired in part by the twisty figures of Mannerist and Baroque artists like Jacopo Pontormo and El Greco. And he had found an application for that style in the vision of a populist, working-class America remembered from his childhood.

His timing was astute. As the decade went on, the country, fed up with the cosmopolitan excesses of the Jazz Age and heading toward economic disaster, began turning inward, searching its own history for sustaining narratives. Benton was on hand to paint those narratives.

In the early 1930s, when the country hit bottom, his profile was high, and many young painters sought him out at the Art Students League, where he taught. One of them was Pollock, who arrived in Manhattan in 1930, as ambitious and under­skilled as Benton had been in Paris. The two men bonded in a complicated, mentoring friendship, no doubt cemented by a mutual investment in alcohol, and a pumped-up machismo built on various personal insecurities.

Strained and broken friendships were common in Benton’s life. So were professional battles. Lucrative mural commissions came to him in the 1930s, but so did criticism. Leftists pointed to racial and ethnic stereotypes in a mural he did for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Conservatives objected to his inclusion of Ku Klux Klan figures in another mural, this one on the history of Indiana done for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

Leery of partisan ideology and ever sensitive to personal assault, real and imagined, Benton kept shifting his politics, from left to right and back, eventually hovering in a quasi-libertarian zone. But then, everything about him was conflicted. He was an avid reader and writer who vilified intellectuals. He was critical of all centralized authority except his own autocratic theories of what art should or should not be. (It had to be rooted in social experience; it couldn’t float free, be about itself.) He condemned capitalism but decorated corporate walls and presidential libraries. He claimed that his work honored the average American, yet his murals are laced with satirical figures of working people.

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March 8, 2011, Tuesday

THE Whitney Museum of American Art is billing its display of ''The Arts of Life in America,'' five murals painted by Thomas Hart Benton, as ''a landmark homecoming.'' For the past 51 years, the murals have been part of the permanent collection of the...

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Throughout 1941, using Kansas City, Mo., as his home base, the painter Thomas Hart Benton had traveled throughout the Great Plains, praising the canvases of Iowa's Grant Wood while denouncing the modernist conceits of France. No part of American...

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